"It was not the best of quarters for Linux vendor Novell. When Novell announced its financial results for its first fiscal quarter, which ended Jan. 31, 2006, it reported revenue of $274 million [EUR 227 million], compared to revenue of $290 million [EUR 241 million] for the first fiscal quarter 2005. This was a decline from the previous quarter in which Novell had reported $320 million [EUR 266 million] of revenue."

It's not really a surprise, I'm afraid. Novell are caught between a rock and a hard place and it is gradually grinding them away. If you take out everything that isn't Linux or open source, Novell could be a nice, tight company, smaller than Red Hat to be sure but showing good growth particularly in identity management. But if you add back in the old Novell and the Netware behemoth as reported here it is a sprawling beast with hopelessly crippling overheads and declining overall sales.

All one can see here is an eventual break up and a nasty shareholder fight over that $1.7 billion of cash and liquid assets. Here's to hoping SuSE emerges reasonably unscathed. In the meantime, the chairman's tenure is up, I would guess. He's at the end of the period he said he needed to turn the company round. Flogging off SuSE to Novell is looking more and more like typical greedy short-termism from the investment crowd.